Lets say I want to find the youngest/newest *.txt file inside a folder, for example /tmp/? I wrote this little python script for this, but are there better ways to do it?
By youngest I mean the file with the least recent change or creation date? All files have these timestamps. But could I also watch the filesystems folder for file creation events?
import os
import glob
def find_newest_file_type(glob_path):
# youngest file has biggest timestamp
youngest = -10
ultpath = "file_does_not_exist0xfadfadsfadfads.asdfajsdklfj"
for file in glob.iglob(glob_path):
mtime = os.path.getmtime(file)
if mtime > youngest:
youngest = mtime
ultpath = file
return ultpath
newest = find_newest_file_type("/tmp/*.txt")
I am really unexperienced in bash, so until now I did even these things in python … but maybe this should change
When I run this in my /tmp folder like this:
find . -type f -name "*.tmp" -printf '%T@ %p\n' | sort -n | tail -n 1 | cut -f2- -d" "It says these things …find: ‘./systemd-private…<imagine service name here>’: Permission deniedWhile the other commenters command
ls *.tmp -Art | tail -n 1does not complain as much, is this because it searches all sub-directories as well?yes,
finddoes look at sub-directories - sorry, I didn’t realize you only wanted it to search in the current dir and not in sub-directories. You would add-maxdepth 1to thefindcommand to tell it to only look in the current dir, not further.EDIT: and yeah, I would recommend doing tasks like this in bash - you can just type them directly into the terminal. The convenience of writing one-liners like this from memory is hard to beat.
Once you have enough experience you can just do it from memory, it’s all accessible. Writing a python program and running it every time you want to do a small task like finding the newest file is overkill IMO. But it can be nice to have a little cheatsheet file of bash oneliners you have written in the past to refer to later, esp. as a beginner.
That said, it’s not wrong to take what I would see as the less convenient route by writing a python script - it can be fun to learn both, and it’s more useful to use python if you need to automate a more complicated task or need that newest file as a part of a larger program you’re writing in python.
Thanks, with maxdepth 1 it works without errors!
Since the step of finding the youngest file in the folder is part of a larger more complicated workflow/pipeline for me (transcribe the youngest wav file in the tmp folder, name the resulting transcript after the youngest file in the …/recordings_folder/ and copy it there) I will need to integrate it into a python script I think.